Typical (6 page)

As the goats continue to move vertically, their powerful bushy rumps just out of range, we turn laterally and head for a close-looking space between two peaks. Mr. Irony says: “Mine shaft’d be nice.”

We were given the opportunity to choose means of transport during the next leg of
Duke’s
Man-at-His-Best World Tour. The territory to be crossed was Georgia and South Carolina, south to north. We could take I-95 with a life-insurance salesman who had once been an oil rigger and then had tried to be a bass guide for Roland Martin, or we could take back roads in a log truck with a crew of pulpwooders.
Duke
said, “Excuse the indelicacy, but in local parlance these fellows, black or white, are known as pulpwood niggers, and they stink to high heaven, have potted meat and Mellow Yellow for lunch, do not visit dentists.” There was no question which Mr. Irony would choose, and we were not surprised to see Borger and Pampa pile into the insurance salesman/bass guide’s 4×4 Blazer Silverado with smoked glass all around. As the doors closed, we saw the salesman spray a shot of Binaca into his mouth.

“His hairdo was not unreminiscent, was it, of Woody Woodpecker?” Mr. Irony asked.

“I thought so myself,” I said, and I had, precisely. The coiffure looked artificially blown up, almost teased, into a topknot at the front of the fellow’s head, and it was in fact carrot-colored. Mr. Irony and I, by this sight, were reassured that we had made the correct choice of transport. We sat together on the cooler of beer
Duke
had advised us to prepare for our ride with the pulp-wood niggers, patient in our waiting, for
Duke
had also advised that, though we would arrive at the destination (Dillon, S.C.) well before the insurance salesman would have gotten us there, we might depart up to two hours later.

The pulpwood niggers were three. The driver was white, wearing a blue mesh cap that read
I’m a Rebel and Damn
PROUD OF IT
. At shotgun was a black with his hair plaited into spikes, over which he had tied a black nylon scarf in Arab fashion, with two nylon tails down his back. “Healthy-looking individual,” Mr. Irony remarked of him. “Got them Husqvarna arms.” In the middle of the seat was a suggestion of human form, as a cicada hull on a pine tree suggests an insect. He was chinless, chestless, slumped down bleary-eyed between his larger colleagues. We came to learn he was “the oiler,” by which title was signified his entire
raison d’être:
when the other two ran equipment, he carried and administered the lubricants. If it was chain saws, he carried a pistol-style oil can, squirting the hot blades, muttering every time, “Self-oilers don’t work
for shit.”

The driver, with a motion of his thumb, indicated we were to get on the truck flatbed. We got aboard and were arranging ourselves on the boat cushions we bought with the cooler when the cab rear window slid open and the oiler extended both arms through it. Mr. Irony and I managed to interpret this, and I handed the oiler two cold beers.

“Fatherlaw died last week,” he said, pulling back into the cab with the beer. With a jolt we were off.

Several miles down the road his arms came back through the window, and he was delivered two more beers. “Wife daddy died,” he said, going back in.

Through a rare, obvious communion, Mr. Irony and I were clearly taking extreme pleasure in the ludicrousness of our scene, glancing squarely and without expression at one another during these utterances from the oiler. We were bouncing clear off the truck, on a clay road that now had over it behind us a cloud of dust as far as we could see.

We braked to a halt, and while Mr. Irony and I were still struggling for balance, the driver and the black guy were pissing in the road beside open cab doors. “Pit stop,” the oiler informed us, a bit gratuitously. We got off to piss.

Mr. Irony was boring into the clay in front of him when the black dude said to him, “Nice boots, homeboy.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Pointy-like. Match your head.”

“They do, sir.”

“Spensive, bet. How much they coss, homeboy?”

“Three.”

The oiler interrupted this discourse by letting himself out of the truck and collapsing on the roadside.

“Lumpy daddy died!”
he said, rocking on the ground like a child in a crib. Mr. Irony bent to inspect the bereaved form.

“Pay no mine, homeboy,” the black said to Mr. Irony. “He in moning. Would like them boots.”

“For the asking, sir.” Mr. Irony was already seated on the truck bed pulling hard on one of his Luccheses. It was this willingness, this anticipation, I think, that saved Mr. Irony’s boots. The black looked with just a hint of surprise at Mr. Irony sitting unshod, swinging his socked feet.

“I just try ’em on, homeboy. You all right.”

“Might I kick a few clods in those brogans?”

“Righteous. You bit crazy.”

The two of them exchanged footwear, and the black walked awkwardly around, stopping with the boots under the prostrate, grieving face of the oiler.

“How these look on me, Taint?”

“Leave him alone, Rooster,” the driver said. “Pick him up.” He was smoking, leaning against the truck studying his calloused hands.

“How they look, Taint?” Rooster repeated.

“Lumpy daddy
died.”

Rooster leaned over, off balance, and with one arm picked the oiler up, setting him down on his feet hard, giving him the slightest steadying shake. “Get hole on yourself, man.” The oiler suddenly reminded me of a creature I saw once in an aquarium that I thought merely remained still for a very long time and that I later discovered to have been all along dead, hollowed out.

The driver flicked his cigarette into the woods and got in the truck. “That fag magazine don’t pay us
shit
for this
shit.
You boys get on.”

Mr. Irony, who had been speaking with Rooster, unhooked the boom cable and Rooster released the winch. Mr. Irony pulled ten feet of cable out and got aboard with it. “Homeboy want him a seat belt,” Rooster said, to no one. He stuffed the oiler in the rider’s door. “Homeboy I think may be hisself part nigger. Here. Peench like motherfuck anyway.” Mr. Irony’s Luccheses came through the rear window, and Rooster’s brogans, loaded with beer, went in.

Mr. Irony put two half hitches of cable around his waist and looked to me with a gesture offering some cable, which I declined. He took another half hitch for himself and we settled in, looking backwards, for the ride to Dillon.

Once we had a head of steam and the dust trail behind us well up, Rooster’s arm came through the window and touched the winch control. Mr. Irony put two beers in his jacket, felt his waist, took a deep breath, gave Rooster a thumbs-up, and Rooster winched him free of the bed. He swung out and back, spinning, and settled bed-high beneath the log boom, blowing, turning, already taking on the color of clay, assuming the orientations of a sky diver, the expression on his face rapt.

Just before he disappeared for good into the thick clay air, Mr. Irony managed to face forward, horizontal, with arms out front, and shout, “Superman at His Best!”

“Life insurance is the best investment money can buy. You are investing
in your life
—and what could be a better investment than that?
What?”

“Don’t you have to
die
to cash in?”

“Alack! No, ladies. That’s a thing I read in a Shakespeare story. Nooo, ladies, you do not have to die to enjoy the extreme uncomparable benefits of cash-value life insurance. You may borrow against your policy, and it may mature and pay
before
you die, and—”

“What’s this?”

“What?”

“It says,
ODOR KILLER—CITRUS. AN ENTIRE ORANGE GROVE IN A BOTTLE
.”

“Hey! Don’t squirt too much of that!”

“Open the windows, for God’s sake.”

“Entire orange grove in an entire goddamn car.”

“Well, I told you—”

“What’s
this?
It
stinks.”
Pampa sniffs a cardboard coaster suspended from the rearview mirror; on the coaster is a painting of a largemouth bass.

“Air freshener,” the life insurance salesman says.

“Fish
air freshener?”

“Well, no. It’s—”

“Here’s some Eau de Paris—
NOIR
.”

“That’s
expensive.”

“Oh!”

“Windows! Stop that shit, Borger,” Pampa says.

“What
is
all this crap?” Borger asks.

“Yeah. Are we in the presence of a
complex
here?”

“No, I just like to keep my car spotless. I live in this car—work in this car fifteen-sixteen hours a day.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to smell like a whorehouse.”

“Well—you know how sometimes a car just gets an odor in it that … doesn’t go away?”

“No,”
Pampa says.

“No,”
Borger says.

“You know, kind of
under
things?”

“No.”

“No.
God. Did he
fart?”

“Heysoos. I get the picture. Spot of
ORANGE GROVE
up here, Borger.”

A stop is made for urination all around. Mr. Irony, whose clay-caked face resembles a terra-cotta mask, declines to unwinch and pees from the Superman position.

“Look, Mom, no hands,” he says.

Rooster says to me, “That is one
trazy
white man.”

The oiler heads for the ditch in a mincing wobble and appears to start to wilt when Rooster suspends him by the back of the shirt. “And he
still
dead, Taint,” Rooster whispers to him, shoving him back toward the truck. “Pitiful. Pitt-ee-full.”

“Load my bomb bays, kind sirs,” Mr. Irony calls.

Responding as to a regular call for workaday lubrication, the oiler pulls himself to with a big sniff and hurries to Mr. Irony with two more cold beers, which Mr. Irony instructs him to slip into the pockets of his jacket.

“You will surmount your troubles, son,” Mr. Irony says to him. “Your wife’s father died and he will remain dead, as Mr. Rooster has so sagely informed you. The world means you no harm. Be brave, be brave, and be strong.” Mr. Irony makes a gesture in the air that suggests a blessing and that throws him out of the Superman orientation, and we fire up and are off in a scratch of rock and rubber and clay, Mr. Irony in a spinning circle-within-a-circle boomerang motion.

“Well, thing is, see, she’s a young girl—big girl, you girls would like her, being as you’re from Texas and all, fine state, did my time out there yessiree on rigs outside Odessa, nice folk, hospitality-wise—she’s young, Debbie, and absolutely in love w’me, see—she’s never been that before so she’s, like, skeptical.”

“We trust you encourage her in that skepticism,” Borger says.

“Hey, what’s that supposed to mean?”

“There they are,” Pampa says.

In the parking lot of a boarded-up convenience store in the center of Dillon, S.C., is the log truck, and drinking beer are the blue-Rebel-capped driver, the crumbling oiler laughing with his head thrown back, Rooster, the student of low-affect living edged with self-deprecating irony, and, suspended yet from the boom, orange as a kapok life jacket head-to-toe, Mr. Irony himself.

“Is that your not-husband?” Pampa asks Borger.

“Goose by any other name,” Borger says.

“Hey. What’s the deal? That’s a
dude?”
the insurance salesman asks.

“That’s a dude, mister.”

“Hey.
All right.
He looks like I could sell him some life insurance, you think? What you think? Worth a try or not or what!”

The life insurance salesman gets out of the smoked-glass Blazer and shakes down his pants legs over his Italian ankle boots and walks in a confident stride for Mr. Irony. Before he reaches him, Borger rushes to the orange horizontal figure with the hurried pumping vigor of a sailor’s wife greeting her sailor after six months at sea, and she kisses the unbooted end of it fully upon its clay-caked crusty terra-cotta lips and says, “Oh, honey, you smell
good!”
and the life insurance salesman turns on his heel and retreats, his face a configuration of pure confusion.

Swatting handfuls of the thick, nearly leavened clay dust from himself in a three-quarter beat, Mr. Irony said, to the beat, in time, “Dark, dark candy; light, light pain; green, green fruit; trying, trying times.”

“Is that a quote?” the driver asked.

“Yeah, I’ve heard that somewhere,” the insurance salesman said. “Maybe Shakespeare.”

“Do I detect shower stalls across the boulevard?” Across the street was a coin-operated car wash, to which Mr. Irony made a straight path, removing his boots as he went. He held the long water gun by its barrel, aiming it down at the top of his head, and with the insertion of a quarter engaged the works, disappearing into a vaporous high-pressure cone of suds and steam.

The rest of us stood about somewhat ill at ease. The oiler shortly had the presence of mind to offer Pampa and Borger a beer, and we adjusted into as comfortable a group as we could standing around a log truck drinking beer in a shut-down convenience-store parking lot watching Mr. Irony shower in a car wash. I personally felt negligible, and had for some time, and thought to remove myself from the affair, at least as a
dramatis persona,
it being arguable whether I was contributing much toward my narrative end of the stick; further arguable whether I would ever be able to demonstrate in telling fashion that I had in fact picked up self-deprecating ironic ways from Mr. Irony, whose student I allegedly was, and who (Mr. Irony) was, having finished his shower, walking sopping wet into Bill’s Dollar Store next to the car wash. I could serve the tale best, I thought, and finally not without considerable self-deprecation and irony, by removing myself from it, and decided thereupon to do so, and hereby pronounce myself expunged from this affair as teller—Pampa I intend to continue to have relations with, but that coupling is a private matter and is not to be hereafter mentioned. In point of fact, I had felt for two hundred butt-pounding rough miles that the oiler was the proper student of Mr. Irony, a figure of such unironic beginnings that something like true biblical salvation and conversion, if not a bona fide saintly transformation, was available to him if Mr. Irony attempted to bless him with the vision which would let him stop seeing as important his dead father-in-law and his life as minister of lubricant. Mr. Irony emerged from Bill’s Dollar Store bearing gifts for the crew and for the Available Traveling Women and none for me—confirming me in my resolve to defect. A fair fare-thee-well to you all.